It looks like the DOJ has lost their bid to keep the unredacted Mueller report out of the hands of House Democrats.
Via DC Examiner:
An appeals court upheld a lower court ruling on Tuesday, ordering the Justice Department to give the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee access to secretive redacted grand jury materials contained within former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in a 2-1 vote to uphold U.S. District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s October 2019 ruling that House investigators should be given access to the grand jury material redacted within and underlying Mueller’s report.
The 26-page appeals court opinion said, “It is the district court, not the Executive or the Department of Justice, that controls access to the grand jury materials at issue here.”
The Justice Department objected to disclosure because of “general purposes and policies of grand jury secrecy,” but the court said the arguments “do not outweigh the Committee’s compelling need for disclosure.”
The appeals court said “requests for grand jury materials” of this sort “necessarily require resolution by the courts.”
“We are reviewing the decision,” DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec told the Washington Examiner.
According to the Examiner, the appeals court judges were nominated by three different presidents:
Judge Judith Rogers, appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1993, wrote Tuesday’s opinion and was joined by Judge Thomas Griffith, a President George W. Bush appointee in 2005. The dissenter was Judge Neomi Rao, who joined the court after an appointment from President Trump in 2019.
Is this the end of the road for the DOJ in regards to keeping the unredacted version private? I don’t know. I would imagine if it’s possible they’d appeal this decision to the Supreme Court.
You can read the full decision below: